SEO | Internet Marketing | Web Design Tips

Archive for October, 2009

Hi! My name is Diggy and I am the author of Upgradereality.com – a blog all about self-improvement.
In the 2 years I have been blogging I can tell you a few things about writing and having your own blog, and why it is absolutely fantastic to do it.
Your own blog is your own personal space. It can be used as a journal to record your journey or progress in life, it can be used as a story-book for fictional adventures or it can even be an informative site about a very specific niche like ‘knitting with lama wool’.
Whether for profit or for fun (some people make 5 figures a month from their blogs), blogging is totally fun to do. It is cheap too, all you need is a domain ($10 a year) and hosting (from $5 a month) and a computer with internet access. Trust me, in a year you will easily make $100 from your blog which will cover your hosting and domain costs.
You can get your own blog right now, and you can build it yourself. There is no need for knowledge of computers, programming or technical skills. I have created a tutorial how to set up your own blog from scratch in a step by step manner with screenshots of each step. I created it for the purpose of showing my parents and friends how to set up a blog. So if they can do it, so can you!

A free podcast is one of the newer methods to build traffic and build opt-in lists. You can submit your podcast feed to the various podcast directories and garner a share of the traffic that they serve each day.
First, though, you have to know how to create a podcast. If you’re writing and submitting articles, or posting regularly to your blogs, then you already have the informational content to create your recordings, and that’s really all a podcast is – an audio version of come type of content. It can be as simple as reading your articles into an audio program and saving them as MP3s, then creating your podcast RSS to submit to the podcast directories.
If you’re using your blog posts as the source for your recordings, be sure to use a podcasting plugin to automatically create your podcast RSS. You don’t want it to be mixed in with your main blog feed, but instead to be a separate podcast RSS that only lists your audios in the feed. This then lets you submit that feed to podcast directories like iTunes, PodcastAlley, Podcast Ready, etc.
Additionally, adding these audios to your blog gives it additional accessibility – people who have sight issues, people who speak the language but can’t read or write it, etc, will really appreciate you making your site more accessible to them. Once again you’re building traffic to your blog, and that translates into building opt-in lists too, provided you have the opt-in form on your blog or at least a link to the free gift you offer from your opt-in squeeze pages.
Best of all you don’t need a separate podcast host, since it resides on your blog, and no special podcast technology is needed for visitors to download podcasts – your free podcast is available for them to download from your site, the podcast directories, etc. By being sure to always include your URL so that people can easily subscribe to your podcast RSS feed or download podcasts from our site, you’re ensuring that anyone who is interested in your information has an easy way to find you and download any future MP3s you make available.